The Author’s Story: My First Move East
July 16th, 2005,Your intrepid correspondent is now writing to you from outside the region. I’m in the Princeton, New Jersey, area, where I’m working for my old employer, Educational Testing Service, for a couple of weeks. I’ll be going home soon and am eager to see my wife and daughter again.
My return to Princeton has given me an occasion to remember my first move out of the Midwest. It was the summer of 1988 and there was a severe drought all across the country, with very hot weather to boot. Only a few months before I had received one of the most important letters of my life–an acceptance into the graduate program in English at Princeton University.
I can still remember that acceptance letter: the heft of the thick envelope, the official look of the cover letter, and the carbon-paper smell and crinkle of the forms. Princeton had offered me a four-year fellowship that would pay for tuition and a $6000 stipend per year–not all that much even back then, but enough to get by. I would have to teach in my third and fourth years, but for the first two years, I would have no responsibilities other than my classes. I would be paid to learn! It was my first experience of Princeton’s great wealth, my first look into its atmosphere of privilege.
I was sorry to be leaving my one-bedroom apartment in Dinkytown, the Minneapolis neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. I had gotten used to the space and privacy of my own apartment, which I had earned by working as an apartment caretaker and taking summer jobs. Now I would have to give it up for a soulless room in a modern Princeton dorm.
I packed up my belongings and put a dorm-room-size load of books and other stuff into the smallest U-Haul trailer available, which was hitched to my 1976 Dodge Aspen station wagon (inherited from my Grandpa Jack) and headed east on Interstate 94.
I’d driven to Chicago before, though perhaps only with my family, so the trip through Wisconsin and northern Illinois was familiar. I passed through beautiful, rolling Wisconsin countryside, through the strange, flat, piney landscape of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, with its unusual rock outcroppings; through the Madison area, a college radio island; then into the corn-field prairie of southern Wisconsin. As I drove south out of Wisconsin, I left the Upper Midwest and its quieter roads behind. Free highway travel was now behind me. It would be tolls all the way from Chicago to the New Jersey border as I made my way across the nation’s busy midsection.
I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Chicago the first night. If I remember right, the next day I opted for the route that took me near downtown Chicago. I’ve always marveled at that city’s size and thrilled to see its lakeside skyline. For me Chicago is a metaphor of the larger world beyond home. But on this trip there was no stopping in downtown Chicago. It was onto northern Indiana, at which point I popped a tape of John Cougar Mellencamp into the tape deck and enjoyed the pretty, rolling scenery. I also had Bruce Springsteen music with me on the trip, as preparation for New Jersey and fitting accompaniment for the road.
Most of the drama of this trip was internal, though on I-80 outside of Toledo I had a flat tire and had to fix it on the side of the freeway. That entailed unhitching the trailer and emptying the back of the station wagon. Fortunately, the damaged tire was not on the traffic side. Then, it was on through more parched landscape to Pennsylvania, where I took I-76 towards the southern part of the state.
I spent an anxious night in a cheap, somewhat rundown motel in Somerset, Pennsylvania–after having decided not to stay at the name-brand motels. I felt troubled by the unfamiliar, seedy surroundings. I woke up early and hit the road again, and the scenery restored me. I passed through Pennsylvania mountains then into densely peopled New Jersey, finally entering leafy Princeton.
Here I was at the next stage of my life, eager for what it would bring, both welcoming and fearing new things.